Where APIs meet Health Equity by Design: Introducing the FHIRedApp Health Innovation
With a heightened focus on well being equity all through our function, ONC has adopted the concept of “health fairness by style.” Alongside those people strains, health and fitness IT can, and should, be employed to better recognize and mitigate disparities although maximizing chances for underrepresented populations. In 2019, less than the Leading Edge Acceleration Jobs (LEAP) for Health and fitness IT system, ONC funded the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Clinical Faculty (Dell Med) to design, establish, and demonstrate enhanced patient engagement technologies for care and investigate, with a concentrate on health and fitness fairness.
The Dell Med crew proposed developing a client engagement technological innovation system applying software programming interfaces (APIs) and the very same nationwide standards for interoperability, stability, and authorization being utilised by digital overall health documents, namely FHIR® and Smart on FHIR.
Building the FHIRedApp System
The FHIRedApp platform was built working with human-centered structure methodology to determine the wants and choices of a diverse team of Latino, African-American, and Asian-American patients. To style an uncomplicated-to-use system, the crew held 20 Group Engagement Studio (CES) classes with ethnically and racially various sufferers from Central Texas. The approach associated beta tests, semi-structured interviews, and pilot testing with members to be certain the app’s higher usability.
A community navigator led each CES session, and the dialogue topics involved group well being ordeals, neighborhood readiness, style and design choices, adoption, and sustainability. The procedure for creating the app also included human-centered style methodologies and insights gathered from the CES classes helped recognized options and capabilities that ethnically and racially assorted individuals desired from a overall health application platform. A large-fidelity prototype of the app (Figure 1) was then developed, beta tested by varied patients, and utilized by the progress workforce to code for the ultimate application.
Figure 1: FHIRedApp significant-fidelity prototype
Whilst the FHIRedApp will be able to hook up to FHIR API endpoints offered by licensed EHR technologies required by the ONC Cures Act Last Rule, the platform has also been developed to leverage health and fitness information exchanges (HIEs) and investigation networks, which act as facts aggregators from various EHRs. The FHIRedApp is also an application platform that permits individuals to gain entry to their facts, grant entry to all or element of their data, and make it out there to 3rd-party application builders by way of FHIR APIs. The Dell Med staff is presently building a pilot app to aid with recruitment for research research and integration with social companies referral networks.
The enhancement of FHIRedApp has revealed how technological know-how improvements making use of FHIR APIs for exchanging knowledge can be knowledgeable as a result of a methodology of group engagement and human-centered design. Seeking forward, the crew and community associates hope to continually offer you extra options and enhancements on the platform and take a look at scalability applying other HIEs and information sources in the long term. To find out additional about this challenge, browse the Dell Med team’s results.
